The story
Founded by Jeff Bezos on Jul 5, 1994, in Seattle.1
1994–2010
On July 5, 1994, Amazon was founded as "Cadabra" by Jeff Bezos, after he relocated from New York City to Bellevue, Washington, to operate an online bookstore. Bezos chose Seattle for its abundance of technical talent from Microsoft and the University of Washington, as well as its smaller population and the proximity to a major book distribution warehouse in Roseburg, Oregon. Seattle beat out Portland, Oregon and Boulder, Colorado.
In November 1994, Bezos renamed the company Amazon to reflect his ambitions for his company. (Amazon is the world's largest river.)
On July 16, 1995, the Amazon website launched, initially sourcing its books directly from wholesalers and publishers.
In May 1997, Amazon went public.
In 1998, Amazon began selling music and videos. It began international operations by acquiring online booksellers in the UK and Germany. In 1999, it expanded to sell more products, including music, video games, consumer electronics, home improvement items, software, games, and toys.
In 2000, US toy retailer Toys "R" Us entered into a 10-year agreement with Amazon, valued at $50 million per year plus a cut of sales, under which Toys "R" Us would be the exclusive supplier of toys and baby products on the service, and the chain's website would redirect to Amazon's Toys & Games category. In 2004, Toys "R" Us sued Amazon, claiming that because of a perceived lack of variety in Toys "R" Us stock, Amazon had knowingly allowed third-party sellers to offer items on the service in categories that Toys "R" Us had been granted exclusivity. In 2006, a court ruled in favor of Toys "R" Us, giving it the right to unwind its agreement with Amazon and establish its independent e-commerce website. The company was later awarded $51 million in damages.
In 2001, Amazon entered into a similar agreement with Borders, under which Amazon would comanage Borders.com as a co-branded service. Borders pulled out of the arrangement in 2007.
In 2002, the company launched Amazon Web Services (AWS), which initially focused on providing APIs for web developers to build web applications on top of Amazon's e-commerce platform. In 2004, AWS expanded to provide website popularity statistics and web crawler data from its Alexa Web Information Service. AWS later shifted toward providing enterprise services with Simple Storage Service (S3) in 2006, and Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) in 2008, allowing companies to rent data storage and computing power.
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In 2006, Amazon launched the Fulfillment by Amazon program, which allowed individuals and small companies (called "third-party sellers") to sell products through Amazon's warehouses and fulfillment infrastructure.
In March 2008, Amazon bought Audible for about $300 million.
The AmazonBasics brand was introduced in 2009, offering a range of Amazon-branded products.
In June 2010, Amazon Seller Product Suggestions was launched.
2011–2020
On October 18, 2011, Amazon.com announced a partnership with DC Comics for the exclusive digital rights to many popular comics, including Superman, Batman, Green Lantern, Sandman, and Watchmen. The partnership caused booksellers such as Barnes & Noble to remove these titles from its shelves.
Amazon acquired Kiva Systems, a warehouse automation company, in 2012.
Amazon bought Goodreads in March 2013.
In November 2013, Amazon announced a partnership with the US Postal Service to begin delivering orders on Sundays. The service, included in Amazon's standard shipping rates, initiated in metropolitan areas of Greater Los Angeles and New York, with plans to expand into Dallas, Houston, New Orleans and Phoenix by 2014.
Amazon acquired Twitch in August 2014 for $970 million.
In November 2015, Amazon opened a physical Amazon Books store in University Village in Seattle. The store was 5,500 square feet and prices for all products matched those on its website. Amazon opened its tenth physical bookstore in 2017. All locations were closed in 2022 along with other retail locations under the "Amazon 4-Star" brand.
In July 2016, the company announced that it was opening a 1,100,000 ft (335,280.0 m) square foot facility in Palmer Township in the Lehigh Valley region of eastern Pennsylvania. As of 2024, Amazon is the Lehigh Valley region's third-largest employer.
In June 2017, Nike agreed to sell products through Amazon in exchange for better policing of counterfeit goods. This proved unsuccessful and Nike withdrew from the partnership in November 2019. Companies including IKEA and Birkenstock also stopped selling through Amazon around the same time, citing similar frustrations over business practices and counterfeit goods.
Amazon purchased Whole Foods Market supermarket chain for $13.7 billion in 2017. It had over 300 million active customer accounts as of 2020.
In September 2017, Amazon ventured with one of its sellers JV Appario Retail owned by Patni Group which recorded income of US$104.44 million (₹759 crore) in financial year 2017–2018.
As of October 11, 2017, Amazon Fresh sold a range of Booths branded products for home delivery in selected areas.
Amazon bought Ring for US$1 billion in 2018. On November 13, 2018, Amazon announced that it would divide its planned HQ2 between New York City and Northern Virginia. On February 14, 2019, Amazon canceled its plan for the New York City HQ2 site.
In November 2018, Amazon reached an agreement with Apple Inc. to sell selected products through the service, via the company and selected Apple Authorized Resellers. As a result of this partnership, only Apple Authorized Resellers were allowed to sell Apple products on Amazon effective January 4, 2019.
The Amazon Live e-commerce streaming service launched in 2019.
Amazon experienced rapid growth during the COVID-19 pandemic, hiring more than 100,000 staff in the US and Canada.
2021–present
On July 5, 2021, Bezos moved from CEO to executive board chair. Former AWS CEO Andy Jassy replaced him as CEO. In January 2023, Amazon cut over 18,000 jobs, primarily in consumer retail and its human resources division in an attempt to cut costs.
In September 2021, Amazon announced the launch of Astro, its first household robot.
On November 8, 2023, a plan was adopted for Jeff Bezos to sell approximately 50 million shares of the company over the next year with a deadline of January 31, 2025. The first step was the sale of 12 million shares for about $2 billion.
In 2023, Amazon invested $1.25B in Anthropic. In return Anthropic designated AWS as a primary cloud partner and began using Amazon's Trainium and Inferentia chips. Anthropic Claude models became available on Amazon Bedrock. In March 2024, Amazon invested a further $2.75B. In November, Amazon invested $4B more. In April 2026, Amazon invested $5B.
In January 2023, Amazon announced the launch of RXPass, a prescription drug delivery service.
In February 2024, Amazon announced its first chatbot, "Rufus", for use in the US; in July it was widely available to all customers in the US. "Rufus" is available in the US, India and the UK to help shoppers get product recommendations, shopping list advice, compare products, and see what other customers have responded to regarding their specific questions.
On February 26, 2024, Amazon became a component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average.
On December 19, 2024, Amazon workers, led by the International Brotherhood of Teamsters labor union, went on strike against Amazon in at least four states.
On October 8, 2025, Amazon launched prescription vending machines at One Medical clinics in Los Angeles. The machines are operated by Amazon Pharmacy and are able to prescribe a range of common medications, such as antibiotics, inhalers and blood pressure treatments.
On October 28, 2025, the company announced plans to reduce its corporate workforce by 14,000 positions, reported as Amazon's largest round of job cuts since 2022. In January 2026, Amazon announced a second round of layoffs, affecting approximately 16,000 corporate employees. Company statements described the layoffs as part of a broader effort to streamline operations, reduce bureaucracy, and adapt to changing business conditions, including artificial intelligence technologies. Affected employees were offered severance packages and support for internal job placement.
In January 2025, Amazon filed an objection to Saks Global's bankruptcy plan. Amazon invested $475 million into Saks' acquisition of Neiman Marcus, and worried that Saks' bankruptcy would harm creditors and push the tech company further down the repayment pecking order.
In January 2026, Amazon entered talks with OpenAI to invest up to $50 billion. Amazon had a deep strategic partnership with Anthropic, OpenAI's competitor. In January 2026, Amazon laid off 16,000 employees in its second round of large-scale job reductions in three months due to AI.
In March 2026, Amazon pledged to bear the entire cost of new electricity generation to power its data centers.
In 2020, Amazon Fresh opened several physical stores in the US and the UK. In January 2026, Amazon announced it would close all of its Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh stores to shift focus to its online same-day delivery service and expand its Whole Foods Market business. The closure affects 57 Fresh stores and 15 Amazon Go locations, some of which will be converted into Whole Foods stores.
Amazon launched Amazon Supply Chain Services in May 2026.
Launched in 2005, Mechanical Turk provided a crowdsourcing platform through which businesses and researchers could outsource human-completed tasks. The service was also used for human data annotation and review in machine-learning applications, including through Amazon SageMaker. In August 2026, Amazon announced that AWS Mechanical Turk would be discontinued on September 30, 2026, ending the service after more than 21 years.
From Wikipedia’s article on Amazon (company), shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.8